[ Lost in the Landscape ]

treefall

I was head­ing back to my desk at work on Thurs­day and noticed a clus­ter of my cowork­ers look­ing out a win­dow. There’s a lit­tle access road right out­side. Usu­ally it doesn’t have a full-grown euca­lyp­tus tree fallen across it, but this day it did.

I don’t have my cam­era with me most of the time, but Declan had his. He was part of the vol­un­teer crew who wres­tled the tree to the curb, but he also man­aged take these shots.

[ View the entire set on Flikr ]

Not much later the building’s safety per­son had issued a warning:

Just a heads-up, lit­er­ally: high winds are blow­ing down euca­lyp­tus branches and trees around cam­pus. About an hour ago, an entire tree broke off and fell across the access road… (Very for­tu­nately, no peo­ple or vehi­cles were in its path.) Until the winds die down, please be sure to watch and lis­ten for break­ing branches and avoid walk­ing through the euca­lyp­tus groves.

The UCSD cam­pus is home to over 200 thou­sand of these trees in plant­i­ngs that date back a hun­dred years, back to a euca­lyp­tus mania when euca­lyp­tus were planted all over South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, includ­ing three mil­lion just a few miles up the coast in what’s now Ran­cho Santa Fe.

If you live in this part of the state you’ve prob­a­bly heard the sto­ries: that the trees are call wid­ow­mak­ers because they drop their branches if you look at them wrong, that they’re just giant non-native weeds that take up valu­able space…bad things like that.

I won­der if the bad rap on the first count is entirely deserved. For sure, some euca­lyp­tus are brit­tle, and there have been three times in the last year alone when I was within fifty feet or thirty sec­onds of being taken out by falling euca­lyp­tus. But with almost a quar­ter mil­lion of them on cam­pus and mil­lions of them in town it’s inevitable that a few of them keel over or fall apart. Are they that much worse than oaks or other trees that peo­ple plant by the millions?

I did a quick and totally infor­mal sur­vey of some head­lines, euca­lyp­tus ver­sus oaks. Maybe the eucs are totally bad news. May they’re not that much worse than other species. What­ever the case, they def­i­nitely can be gor­geous trees.

Shad­ows cast over tow­er­ing euca­lyp­tuses (Euca­lyp­turs kills woman in Old Town San Diego, The San Diego Union-Tribune–Jan­u­ary 8, 2003)

2 killed in ‘freak acci­dent’ : Falling oak crushes pickup on County Line Rd. (Oak tree, The Post and Courier (Charleston, N.C.)–April 16, 2008)

Tree check asked after acci­dent (Euca­lyp­tus kills woman in parked pickup truck, Evening Tri­bune (San Diego, CA)–December 25, 1987)

Man killed by falling tree (Oak tree falls onto pickup truck, News Sen­tinel, (Knoxville, TN) Decem­ber 28, 2008)

$160,000 awarded in Zoo death (Award given to fam­ily of girl killed by falling euca­lyp­tus, The San Diego Union–August 2, 1986)

Girl killed by falling tree at Boy Scout camp (Oak tree, Asso­ci­ated Press, via MSNBC–August 10, 2005)

Half of the inci­dents above involved pickup trucks. Weird. Maybe that’s the deadly com­bi­na­tion: pickup trucks and large trees. Like mobile homes and tornadoes…

January 31 2009 | Categories: landscape • places • rambles | Tags: eucalyptus • falling trees • oaks • trees • UCSD | 4 Comments »

talking trees

If a tree talks in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Tues­day morn­ing I had my choice of places to view the tele­vised inau­gu­ra­tion of Barack Obama or ways to hear the audio feed. Work­ing as I do on the UCSD cam­pus, there were rooms in libraries, radios at cof­fee stands and indi­vid­ual lap­tops that were all play­ing the cer­e­monies. The most unusual venue I could pick from was to hear the inau­gu­ra­tion broad­cast through the speak­ers of lead-plated euca­lyp­tus trees that were installed over twenty years ago as part of the campus’s Stu­art Col­lec­tion.

Left: The tree in the instal­la­tion that plays music.

The work is Trees by artist Terry Allen, and was con­structed from three euca­lyp­tus that either had died or had to be removed to make way for new con­struc­tion. The dead trees were cut into big chunks, dipped in wood preser­v­a­tive, reassem­bled, and then cov­ered with small sheets of lead attached nails. What was the artist’s intent? The Stu­art Collection’s descrip­tion offers this explanation:

One could walk through the grove sev­eral times before notic­ing Allen’s two unob­tru­sive trees.  Not only do these trees rein­vest a nat­ural site with a lit­eral sense of magic but they implic­itly make con­nec­tions between nature and death and the life of the spirit.  It is not sur­pris­ing that stu­dents have dubbed this area the “Enchanted Forest.”

At the entrance to the vast, geo­met­ric library the third tree of Allen’s instal­la­tion remains silent — per­haps another form of the tree of knowl­edge, per­haps a reminder that trees must be cut down to print books and build build­ings, per­haps a dance form, or per­haps not­ing that one can acquire knowl­edge both through obser­va­tion of nature and through research.

Right: The tree in the instal­la­tion that recites poetry.

On Tues­day, the tree that ordi­nar­ily recites poetry and the one that typ­i­cally offers songs and music were ded­i­cated to an audio feed of the Pres­i­den­tial inau­gu­ra­tion. The orga­niz­ers had high hopes, pre­dict­ing “hun­dreds of stu­dents” would show up for the event. But for the few min­utes I could spend there, I counted just about a dozen peo­ple and two dogs (well-behaved ones, attend­ing with their own­ers, not dogs doing their thing on the trees…).

Left: The “bark” on the mute tree, show­ing the nails hold­ing the lead plates, as well as the list of cred­its of the peo­ple who worked on the project.

Left: The mute tree, as seen from the library entrance.

The spe­cial pro­gram­ming wasn’t the eas­i­est sell that morn­ing. The inau­gu­ra­tion was already a huge event.

I’ll have to admit I had a hard time pay­ing atten­tion the the art event myself. You could feel change in the air. And even talk­ing trees in a for­est weren’t enough to get peo­ple to stop.

January 22 2009 | Categories: art | Tags: Barack Obama • eucalyptus • presidential inauguration • recycling • Stuart Collection • Terry Allen • trees • UCSD | 4 Comments »

inspired by nature: colors

I wrote ear­lier about how the euca­lyp­tus trees in my area had started to shed their bark and men­tioned how there were some inter­est­ing col­ors com­bi­na­tions that were hap­pen­ing as part of the process. The trees have con­tin­ued shed­ding bark all sum­mer and now into fall.

Not long ago I was talk­ing to Linda about col­ors, and she’d men­tioned being struck by some of the same col­ors her­self, and how some­day she thought it might be inter­est­ing to make a quilt using some of those unex­pected jux­ta­po­si­tions of color.

For fun, I’ve taken some pho­tos and made color palettes based on them using the tools at colourlovers.com. Most of the com­bos come from col­ors on the bark, but the last one below derives from the col­ors of new leaves against the berry-red shades of the new stems.

These are all on the lit­eral side. You could take any of these pic­tures and get a lot wilder–especially into the plum-grape-purple territory.

The titles for the palettes–“widomaker”–comes from the dark nick­name gum trees have in Aus­tralia because of their casual habit of drop­ping branches onto unsus­pect­ing folk below. It’s not hyper­bole. Twice, just this past year, I’ve come within less than fifty feet of hav­ing big branches dropped on my head.

Color by COLOURlovers


Color by COLOURlovers


Color by COLOURlovers

September 21 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • plant profiles | Tags: color combinations • eucalyptus • exfoliating bark • inspired by nature | No Comments »

some spring wildflowers in the fake forest

I wrote a bit on find­ing dich­e­lostemma in the fake for­est of UCSD’s euca­lyp­tus groves. Here are a cou­ple more shots of some of what’s bloom­ing there, cour­tesy the win­ter rains:






Where are we? Cal­i­for­nia? Aus­tralia? The wild­flow­ers say one thing, the trees another…

March 16 2008 | Categories: places • rambles | Tags: eucalyptus • in bloom | No Comments »

a fake forest

Last time, I wrote about going to the euca­lyp­tus groves at UCSD to look for wild­flow­ers. I’ve always been fas­ci­nated with these areas of the cam­pus. Boston ivy grow­ing on brick build­ings might define the look of cer­tain East Coast schools, but here it’s the euca­lyp­tus trees.

At first your eye fol­lows the trunks on these trees, in the sum­mer cov­ered with beau­ti­ful exfo­li­at­ing bark, up to the high branches and out to the weep­ing branches that come back towards earth, often with vivid red col­oration on the stems, con­trast­ing with the slen­der gray-green leaves. Indi­vid­u­ally the trees are strik­ing, and grow­ing together they give the impres­sion of a light, sunny for­est. Pay some atten­tion to how they’re planted, how­ever, and the ini­tial impres­sion of pris­tine nature falls apart. Below I’ve taken a pic­ture and drawn black lines that accen­tu­ate the rigid rows that were used to plant the “for­est.” Not so nat­ural after all. South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, home of the sim­u­lacra man­u­fac­tured in Hol­ly­wood, the fake fea­tures of Dis­ney­land, and the arti­fi­cially buxom women of West-Side L.A., does it again.

You prob­a­bly know that the trees are native to Aus­tralia, and may know that down under they’re some­times called “widow-makers” because of their ten­dency to drop their branches onto peo­ple. You may even know their his­tory in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, that they were planted by the mil­lions as part of var­i­ous get-rich schemes in the later 19th and ear­lier 20th cen­turies, with promises that they’d grow wood for rail­road tres­tles or ocean piers, or that they’d yield essen­tial oils with all sorts of mirac­u­lous prop­er­ties. A great arti­cle in the Jour­nal of San Diego His­tory goes into some of their fas­ci­nat­ing past.

The plant­i­ngs that remain through­out South­ern Cal­i­for­nia are beau­ti­ful stands. The occa­sional grove even har­bors monarch but­ter­flies on the migra­tions. (An area of the UCSD groves used to be alive with mon­archs dur­ing the win­ter in the ear­lier 1980s, but I haven’t seen more than the occa­sional monarch since then. Too bad, for sure.) But these groves of perfectly-aligned trees for me talk about cul­ture and nature, and of the ways acci­dents of his­tory shape how the world looks today.

March 15 2008 | Categories: landscape • places • rambles | Tags: eucalyptus • forest • UCSD | 2 Comments »

into the wild

A cou­ple posts ago I men­tioned dich­e­lostemma bloom­ing in the gar­den and I was think­ing that they were prob­a­bly also bloom­ing wild in the nat­ural spaces around me. I took a lunchtime walk through one of the semi-wild areas on the north part of the cam­pus of the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, San Diego. The area has been set aside as a nat­ural pre­serve, although “nat­ural” in this case is actu­ally a canyon of native plants mixed in with some ear­lier 20th cen­tury plant­i­ngs of euca­lyp­tus. Fake as it may be as a gen­uine South­ern Cal­i­for­nia chap­ar­ral ecosys­tem, the edges where the grove meets the scrub starts to take on more native flavors.

There had been heavy rains this past Jan­u­ary, fol­lowed by occa­sional wet peri­ods, so the ground was still moist in spots. The weather was now turn­ing warm, sunny and spring-like. Grasses were grow­ing exu­ber­antly. It wasn’t long before I started to notice occa­sional flow­ers in the under­story. Although the spaces under the euca­lyp­tus prove hos­tile to most flow­er­ing plants other than the occa­sional also-imported black mus­tard, the blue dicks were pretty con­tent to be there, a sin­gle plant here, big rafts of them there.


A flow­er­ing head of Dich­e­lostemma cap­i­ta­tum, mixed in with the grasses and euca­lyp­tus


A larger stand of them, with their lit­tle flower heads raised up two feet or more in the dap­pled shade

I was tuned in to what I was see­ing, but in the back of my mind I was aware that back in my gar­den the same species of plants was also bloom­ing. Back home the blue dicks are part of a long con­tin­uum of “spring­time” flow­ers that begin with the first nar­cis­sus in Octo­ber and con­tinue into a num­ber of plants that have yet to bloom. But in the wild areas of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia this is it. Spring is short and–in a wet year like this one–intense, orgias­tic. As the weather warms the rains will stop. The grasses will die out and the flow­ers will fade out. Soon the long brown sea­son will begin. But in the fic­tion­al­ized nat­ural world of my gar­den, spring will be here for sev­eral more months. I’ll enjoy it for sure. But some­how it seems a lit­tle wrong.

March 14 2008 | Categories: landscape • my garden • places • rambles | Tags: blue dicks • Dichelostemma capitatum • eucalyptus • spring • UCSD | 2 Comments »